The British Are Not Coming!

The British Are Not Coming!

Despite The Hype,the `Invasion'has Only Amounted To A One- Band Incursion

August 23, 1996|By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Music Critic.

Don't look now, but we're being invaded. So say certain segments of the British music press, who insist that America is going crazy--crazy!--over a succession of fresh-faced guitar-pop bands from the United Kingdom.

But don't break out the barricades just yet. The latest British Invasion of the U.S. pop charts so far has been a one-band assault. That band, Oasis, will headline Tuesday at the Rosemont Horizon on the heels of two best-selling albums, the 1994 "Definitely Maybe," which has sold 500,000 copies in the U.S., and the 1995 breakthrough "What's the Story (Morning Glory)," which has piled up 3 million customers.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Sept. 13, 1996:Cast clarificationA quote from Metro publicist Kathryn Frazier in a Tribune piece a few weeks ago on the relative lack of impact made by Britpop bands in America is in need of clarification. Although the British band Cast played to a relatively sparse crowd of 300 at Metro, as noted in the story, Frazier says that by the standards of a typical Wednesday night "Metro 500" crowd, the show was among the best the club has had. Frazier's remark that Cast "didn't exactly blow Chicago away" came in response to a question about the hyperbole of the British press, which compared Cast's recent North American tour to the Beatles playing Shea Stadium.

Oasis is easily the biggest band in Britain at the moment, and one U.K. music publication has even named an entire musical movement after Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher. "Noelrock" includes such bands as Cast, Ocean Colour Scene and others who share the Oasis aesthetic: Write taut pop songs, play big-sounding guitars and sing like a Beatle.

"I think something good is happening at the moment in British music," says Mark Morriss, singer of one of the best of the new melody-driven guitar bands, the London-based Bluetones. "There's been a positive impact over here because of Oasis' success, because there's a sense of achievement if a band breaks in America. Suddenly you're taken much more seriously."

Morriss' band has yet to tour America but many of Oasis' contemporaries have. To read the British music weeklies, it sounds like only a matter of time before the Union Jack will be flying over every rock club in America. Melody Maker recently offered this breathless assessment of Cast's recent North American tour: "Imagine a scaled-down version of the Beatles at Shea Stadium--hysteria, history in the making--and you'll have some idea of the Castmania sweeping America."

Such hyperbole is fairly typical of the British music press, but it has failed to translate into wide success for Anglophile rock in America. When Cast recently played Metro in Chicago, it drew 300 paying customers to the 1,100-capacity Clark Street club. "By most standards, that's a total failure," club publicity manager Kathryn Frazier says. "Old Cast didn't exactly blow Chicago away."

Although Cast's "All Change" album has sold more than 600,000 copies in England, it has barely made a ripple in the U.S. with 12,000 sales. The numbers for other would-be U.K. sensations tell an equally underwhelming story, according to SoundScan, which monitors CD retail activity in the U.S.: Supergrass' "I Should Coco" is at 29,000; Blur's "Great Escape" is at 68,000; the Boo Radleys' "Wake Up!" managed 6,000; and the London Suede's "Dog Man Star" has sold a mere 23,000. Of the new Britpop acts, only Radiohead and Elastica have made a significant sales dent, with sales of less than 400,000 each for their most recent albums--hardly on a par with the success of previous British superstar acts in America.

The birth of Britpop

Since the Beatles performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964, America has had a long love affair with British pop bands. The Beatles led what was dubbed the British Invasion, a wholesale takeover of the American charts in the mid to late '60s by a succession of U.K. guitar bands ranging from the horrible (Herman's Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers) to the historic (Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who).

It happened again in the early 1980s, when U.K. synth-pop bands such as Duran Duran, Culture Club and the Human League sold millions of records in North America. But hip-hop and then grunge rock, both North American creations, captured the public's fancy over the last 10 years, and British acts riding any number of trends--the Manchester dance scene, "shoegazer" rock, Grebo, New Romantics--were shunted to the margins in the U.S.

Enter Britpop, a variation on something which North America has always appreciated--namely the concise, catchy guitar-driven songs of the first British Invasion, circa John, Paul, George and Ringo. The first crucial band in the movement were the Stone Roses, whose self-titled 1989 release was a sonic blueprint for all the bands that followed with its bittersweet melodies and alternately chiming and crashing guitars.

The first wave of Britpop bands, from the voluptuous Bowie-esque glam-rockers the London Suede to the Kinks-like social critics in Blur, offered compelling variations on the formula without breaking ground as stylists. What's more, the often dense, detailed Englishness of the slangy lyrics didn't translate with American audiences.

"I do write specifically about English places because that's what I know," says Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, among the best of the Britpop songwriters. "But the songs are still about the concerns of everyday life: Jealousy, sex, love, class revolt. Hopefully people will see through the scenery and get the larger themes out of it."